19. Maren #2
His silhouette is dark against the streetlight glow, just a shape now, just a man I used to know. I watch him stand there for a long moment, hand still pressed to the glass, and then I turn and walk out the front door.
The appointment is on a Tuesday.
Nora offers to come with me, but I tell her no. This is something I need to do alone, not because I’m brave, but because I’m not ready to share it yet. The baby still feels like something that might disappear if I look at it too directly. A wish I made by accident.
The waiting room smells like antiseptic and hope. I fill out paperwork with a steady hand. Name: Maren Bellamy. Emergency contact: I hesitate, then write Nora Bellamy. Spouse: I leave it blank.
The ultrasound tech is gentle. She warms the gel before she applies it, makes small talk about the weather, doesn’t comment on the fact that I’m here without a partner. Maybe she sees it all the time. Maybe she doesn’t judge.
“Okay, let’s see what we’ve got.”
The screen flickers to life. Gray and white static, abstract shapes that mean nothing to me, and then, suddenly, something that looks almost human. A curve, a flutter, a tiny, impossible heartbeat.
“There we go.” The tech smiles. “Nice and strong.”
I’m crying before I realize it.
The sound fills the room, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, like waves against a shore. Like the ocean I used to dream about before I met a man who was too busy to take vacations. My baby’s heart, beating steady and real, and I’m completely alone with it.
“Everything looks good.” The tech is pointing at the screen, explaining measurements, but I can barely hear her over the roaring in my ears. “About six weeks along. Still early, but developing right on track.”
Six weeks. Which means it happened that night, the reconciliation night, when Rhodes came home and actually saw me and we made love like we used to, like we remembered who we were. I thought we were starting over.
Instead, we were ending.
“Do you want pictures?”
I nod. I can’t speak.
She prints them out, three glossy squares showing different angles of the blob that’ll become a person. I hold them in my shaking hands and I think: you don’t know yet. You don’t know that your parents are separated, that your father spent years choosing work over love. You don’t know any of it.
I’m going to have to tell him.
The thought surfaces as I’m walking to my car, ultrasound photos tucked carefully into my bag. I’m going to have to unblock his number, or call his office, or find some way to say: You’re going to be a father. That one night, the only night you showed up in months, it worked.
I sit in the driver’s seat for a long time.
The parking garage is dim and cold. My car smells like the leather conditioner Rhodes always insists on, insisted on, past tense, and there are still crumbs from a protein bar in the cup holder, evidence of the person I was before everything fell apart.
I pull out my phone.
For a long moment, I stare at it. The block list is right there, one tap away. I could unblock him, call him, send him the ultrasound image and watch him show up at Nora’s door with flowers and promises, ready to be a husband again because now there’s something at stake.
That’s the problem, isn’t it?
He’d come back for the baby, try harder for the baby, rearrange his schedule and cut his hours and be present in all the ways he never managed to be for me.
But I was never enough on my own.
I put my phone away.
I’ll tell him. I have to tell him, it’s his child too, and he deserves to know, and keeping this secret forever was never really an option.
But not yet. Not while he can still mistake the pregnancy for another opportunity to win me back.
Not with him standing outside my shop window begging for five minutes like that’ll fix three years of absence.
But I need space first.
I need to figure out who I am without him, really without him, not the holding-my-breath version I’ve been living since the gala. I need to decide what kind of mother I want to be, what kind of life I want to build, before I let him back in to complicate everything.
The baby doesn’t change what he did.
It just changes what happens next.
I start the car. Pull out of the parking garage. Drive back to Nora’s apartment, where my sister is waiting with bad TV and good takeout and no expectations.
That night, after Nora’s asleep, I take out the ultrasound photos and look at them in the dim light of the living room.
Three small squares. A heartbeat. A future I didn’t plan but can’t bring myself to regret.
I think about what it would mean to tell him now. The way he’d pivot, redirect all that relentless energy toward winning me back through the baby. The grand gestures, the nursery he’d build, the version of himself he’d perform until the novelty wore off and work started calling again.
I can’t do that. I can’t let this child become another bargaining chip in a marriage that’s already cost me too much.
So I make a decision.
I’ll tell him when I’m ready. When I’ve built something solid enough that his return can’t shake it. When the baby isn’t a crisis to manage or a reason to reconcile, but just a fact, a person who exists, who deserves a father, but who also deserves a mother who isn’t still bleeding from old wounds.
I tuck the photos back into my bag. Turn off the lamp. Lie down on Nora’s bed and stare at the ceiling until my eyes adjust to the dark.
Tomorrow, I’ll go back to the shop. I’ll make arrangements for strangers’ weddings and funerals. I’ll eat crackers when the nausea hits and pretend I’m fine when customers ask how I’m doing, and build a life, piece by piece, without him in it.
And somewhere down the line, weeks, maybe months, I’ll pick up the phone.
But not yet.
Not yet.